The New York Times asked Stephen Mihm, professor of history, to weigh in on the scandal surrounding Bernard Madoff.
“The sentencing of Bernard Madoff is far more revealing about what it says about our society than about Mr. Madoff’s crimes,” Mihm wrote. “There is a longstanding tradition in American economic history of heaping praise on financiers and speculators in good times and turning on them when the economy goes south. Doing so is not merely about the understandable anger that people have about losing the money they invested with Mr. Madoff; after all, plenty of people who never gave the man a dime are angry at him.”